The best performing companies are often the best aligned. But who in your company is paying attention to how well aligned your strategy is with your organization’s purpose and capabilities? In my research and consultancy with companies, I observe that, oftentimes, no individual or group is functionally responsible for overseeing the arrangement of their company from end to end. Multiple different individuals and groups are responsible for different components of the value chain that makes up their company’s design, and they are often not as joined up as they should be. All too often, individual leaders seek — indeed are incentivized — to protect and optimize their own domains, and find themselves locked in energy-sapping internal turf wars, rather than working with peers to align and improve across the entire enterprise.
Is Anyone In Your Company Paying Attention to Strategic Alignment?
Every company needs an “enterprise leader” — someone who is primarily concerned with mobilizing the resources of the entire company as a system of many moving and interconnected parts. Enterprise leaders are the system architects of their company’s long-term success. They envision what needs to be done to connect the company’s purpose to its strategy to its organizational capabilities, and then design tweaks to processes and structures to make sure that all of these components work in concert with one another. If the only person thinking about that at your firm is the CEO, or an executive who is doing it in 20% of their time, that’s not good enough. Enterprise leadership is the essential ingredient that makes or breaks any organization’s ability to align around strategies and execute effectively.